Overview
SC Clearance or eligibility for SC Clearance Essential
Backend Focus
3 month contract with scope to extend or go permanent
Key Responsibilities
* Backend architecture & APIs (primary focus)
* Design and evolve scalable backend services in Python using FastAPI for high-availability, high-throughput workloads.
* Build well-versioned RESTful APIs aligned to OpenAPI/Swagger, with strong conventions for consistency, idempotency, and backward compatibility.
* Implement authentication and authorization using OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained permissions.
* Design and maintain event-driven architectures and background processing pipelines (e.g. Celery, Redis Streams, Kafka) to enable scalable async workloads, retries, and fault-tolerant integrations.
* Design data models and optimise relational databases (PostgreSQL) for performance, partitioning, and horizontal scale.
* Introduce caching, rate limiting, and queuing to meet performance budgets and latency goals.
* Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and robust error/retry semantics.
Frontend contributions
* Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript as required.
* Work with product and design to take features end-to-end, from API through to UI.
* Help maintain a pragmatic frontend stack with a focus on shipping over perfection, without compromising on security.
Infrastructure contributions
* Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds.
* Contribute to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team
* Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod.
Security and reliability
* Write secure, well-tested code (unit, integration, end-to-end) and uphold coding standards through code reviews.
* Contribute to logging, metrics, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for the services you build.
* Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design.
Cross-functional and process
* Collaborate closely with the engineering team, product and leadership to scope, sequence, and deliver outcomes.
* Translate product requirements into technical plans, breaking work into milestones with measurable success criteria.
* Mentor engineers on backend design, API ergonomics.
Qualifications, experience and Skills
* SC Clearance or the ability to obtain SC (and later DV).
* Proven experience in professional software engineering, with a strong focus on backend development in Python and with event-driven architectures.
* Proven experience designing and operating production REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger.
* Comfortable working in a React/TypeScript codebase.
* Deep understanding of relational database design, indexing, performance tuning, and migrations (PostgreSQL).
* Proficiency with containerisation (Docker) and Git-based workflows.
* Familiarity with AWS core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, ALB/ELB, ECR/ECS).
* Experience with API versioning, security, documentation strategies, and automated testing.
* Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently with high ownership.
Soft skills
* High-agency engineer who owns outcomes end to end.
* Pragmatic, research-driven approach with a bias to ship and iterate.
* Clear communicator who can mentor, influence, and raise the bar for the team.
* Comfortable defining SLAs, making trade-offs explicit, and operating production systems.
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